The influence of CrossFit has dramatically increased the popularity of weightlifting without a doubt. Attendant to that increase are a few other changes: The number of weightlifting coaches in the world has increased, the number of gyms in which weightlifting can be trained has increased, and the percentage of the total number weightlifting coaches who are actually good at coaching weightlifting has decreased.
In a normal world, this dilution of coaching ability wouldn’t be too mu...... Continue reading

About 100 years ago, I posted an article about how to build a lifting platform on a slope. It was something I had to do at the time, so I figured I’d post some instructions while I was at it. Now years later, I’ve been asked more times than I can calculate how to build a platform—I’ve written out instructions in emails and website comments so many times I could have written this article a thousand times over.
First of all, platforms are and have been available to...... Continue reading

I thought I’d try to collect some of the podcast interviews I’ve done for convenience. Now you can keep yourself occupied while driving to work... or at work. I know there are a few missing, as I can’t remember them all and I only have so much patience for google searches. If you know of one, please post the name in the comments.
Weightlifting Academy
Sports Coach Radio
In the Trenches
Rdella Training
Movesmart
Weightlifting...... Continue reading

People seemed to enjoy my Top 5 Assistance Exercises for the Jerk article a few weeks ago, so I’m going to ride that wave as long as I can with another top 5 article, and yes, there will be one for the snatch in the unspecified near future. I’m going to do the clean before the snatch because the snatch gets all the attention on the internet; let’s change the paradigm.
Assistance exercises for the clean and snatch are on average more common and recognizable than those f...... Continue reading

Your movement under the bar in the snatch or clean can be slow for a few different reasons, and that will affect what exercises help. If it’s truly the pull under the bar that’s slow, it may be a strength issue, a technique issue, or a lack of aggressiveness. The following discusses the snatch specifically, but it applies to the clean as well with the exception of the overhead position.
Let’s worry about strength first. You can think of the third pull in three basic pa...... Continue reading

It's been mentioned here before, but the amount of attention the jerk is given by the internet weightlifting world with regard to technique is almost non-existent compared to the snatch and clean (Apparently it’s tougher to make up names for things that everyone’s already doing and pass them off as new ideas in the jerk). I didn’t learn how to jerk correctly until I had already spent so long developing bad habits that I’d basically become a lost cause. That doesn’t ...... Continue reading

We’ve all done it—missed a snatch behind and reassured ourselves by saying a miss behind is better than a miss in front. I would agree that in some cases this is true, but definitely not always, and the causes of a miss behind need to be identified and corrected just like any other miss. Following are the most common reasons for misses behind and ways to fix them.
Excessively Wide Grip
One of the simplest reasons for frequent misses behind that is commonly o...... Continue reading

Weightlifting is a sport in which the rate of progress declines pretty reliably over time. That is, the longer you train, the more slowly you make progress. As you reach the time past the beginning and intermediate stages in which progress is measured in small numbers over large spans of time, having sound programming and strategy is even more important. Part of that is doing everything you can to provide opportunities to measure that progress.
There’s an almost irresistible compulsion...... Continue reading

One of the most common questions I get through the various media through which I’m connected interminably to the weightlifting world is how to properly warm-up for competition. A lot of people are trying weightlifting competition for the first time and have no coach, and a lot of coaches are finding new athletes who want to try competition, and neither know how exactly it all works in the warm-up room. Understandably, this is a source of a great deal of stress and nervousness. I’m go...... Continue reading

Stand up and hang out for a moment. Now consider the muscles around your knees - are they tight and fighting to keep your knee from suddenly bending under the weight of your body? Probably not. We stand on a passive knee lock that doesn't require much muscular work. This is handy, as it would get pretty exhausting to be that active at all times just to stand still.
The problem occurs when we try to initiate a jerk from this position. If you begin your jerk dip from this passive knee lock, the...... Continue reading